Recently, I've been wandering around the oracle space again. To put it simply, oracles are like "data couriers" for on-chain projects, bringing real-world information onto the blockchain.

I came across a new player called Switchboard, and it's ridiculously fast—the latency can be reduced to under 100 milliseconds, and sometimes it even gets it done in just 10 milliseconds. In comparison, the veteran Pyth is still running at a pace of about 1.2 seconds, so that's a difference of more than tenfold. In high-frequency trading scenarios, that time gap could mean real money. In DeFi, whoever has faster and more accurate data gets a bigger slice of the pie.